5. Greater Moral Ambiguity
One of the great joys of contemporary gaming is how they have slowly but surely introduced a morality system, whereby actions good and bad have different consequences, from how other characters react to you, to defining your existence in the closing portions of the game. Though Mass Effect is blessed with the wonderful dialogue wheel system, whereby you are presented with a number of options to reply to an NPC, this also strips any and all moral ambiguity away from the situation, as it creates an objective, absolute morality, whereby one choice is "good", and one is "bad". The fact that you're allocated points on this basis compounds this, and a few times I found myself making tough calls and being rewarded Renegade points despite not really thinking my actions were "bad" as such. Drawing along such lines reduces the choices to simple transactions; those obsessed with becoming "good" will dispassionately select only good options, instead of actually thinking about the tough choices ahead. As someone who doesn't care about being a Renegade or a Paragon and just mulled over the options, I found myself sitting there at several points for a few minutes, really thinking about the moral implications of what I was about to do. It's just a shame that BioWare have to quantify it in such obvious terms.